Fifteen curators. Thirty-one photographers. This issue is pure collaboration. The final result is a beautiful, hand-curated publication of the best contemporary photography in existence today.
My work from series "Aqueous" was chosen by Ann Jastrab, thank you!
Happy to have made to Photo Lucida's Critical Mass 2017 200 list.
Some of the juror's comments about my "Aqueous" series:
- Your inspired experimentation and abundant originality are well met by the beautiful colors and designs of your images.
- Beautiful. Window within windows provide a visual delight and the transparencies make the water feel more present.
- Love the tactile experimentation of this series! Good to see the few installation shots on your website - this work very interactive, would be great to see it in a large-scale environmental exhibit.
- I love this series, there is something really disorienting and modern about them.
- The image 'Relativity' is very good. The image appears to peel back layers of the environment making various state of its nature visible to us in one moment, moving the viewer from calm to anger and back. It is unique in this particular selection of prints with a visual communication that is engaging, graphic and artistic at the same moment.
- Some interesting and effective ways of capturing and presenting water.
- Excellent execution, bravo! Intriguing and compelling. Love the work!
- The thing I find most compelling about your work is the use of layering techniques via transparencies. It is not something I have seen done often and I enjoy having to stop and really try to figure out what is happening in these images. Seeing the work installed really added another dimension of interest for me. I really love the corner installation of the wavy transparency print.
- Strong images, I like what's going on with the layering and transparencies.
Framing Effect: Elevation is now a permanent installation at Syinthesis Sound Centre in Glendale, WI.
17 pieces from Aqueous series have been curated into a show at Vedder Price, Chicago by Patter Hellstrom Visual Art.
Albert P. Weisman Award exhibition at Arcade gallery, Chicago.
MFA Thesis show at Glass Curtain gallery, Chicago.
Published by Mene.CC in 2011.
“The Latvian Elina Ruka creates a series of portraits of ”a potential home”, documenting the “places where her home could be” and looking for the feeling of belonging. Her images compel one to take a closer look and think about a place in a foreign city as home, and, indeed, although she documents different places, all of them have something ineffable in common – just as they have a shared coldness, which is typical of documentary photography.”
“Melancholic representation of social life is frequent in Latvian literature. Two Latvian photographers represent this melancholy visually as the split up place. El?na Ruka explains that she has managed to approach a big industrial city, Lyon, only from more familiar perspective. Her camera observes the city from a garden – a perspective induced by the viens?ta concept. Photos draw a real frontier between the two realms, and the physical separation of a unitary space substantiates the place-bound identity. A wicket gate invites to a triple rite de passage: from a small farmstead to a big industrial city, from family to society, from mono-cultural environment to cultural heterogeneity. To a great surprise, the territory of a new significant Other – the ‘civilized West’ – looks exactly like the urban industrial landscape developed by the Soviets.”
